Tuesday has taken me by surprise yet again, and I’m completely unprepared. So let me tell you some tales of writing times gone by.
Many years ago, I went to a weekend writing conference at a mountain resort. We stayed in cabins that had four bedrooms and one large common area. On the first night, we all gathered in the common area to get to know each other. At some point, the subject of the agent one-on-one meetings came up. Most of us had registered and sent in our first three chapters for consideration weeks before, and we were excited to hear what the agents might say. One of the writers told us she’d heard that NY agents were notorious for stealing stories from inexperienced writers, so she’d taken steps to keep that from happening to her. We tried to tell her that her fear was unfounded – agents don’t make money by stealing from writers. She would have none of it. Agents were the enemy, and she alone knew the trick to keep her book safe.
So what had she done? She sent in 30 random, non-sequential pages from her manuscript.
To this day I wish I could have been in that meeting with the agent.
A long time later, I went to the Tor party at WorldCon to say hello to my editor. When I arrived, I saw he was already chatting with a young woman who had started telling him about her book, and moved on to complaining about how awful her agent was. After a little while, she finally mentioned the agent’s name. It was the same person who represented me. The interesting thing was that she clearly didn’t know that agent was very close friends with the editor she was talking to right that minute. Oops.
One last boo-boo. At some point in between those two stories I already told you, I went to another weekend long writing conference, with my completed manuscript in hand. A very famous NY editor happened to be there, and we had a lovely conversation about all kinds of things at a room party. I finally felt comfortable enough to ask if she might be interested in seeing my book, and she said yes. But instead of agreeing to send it to her after we all got home, I insisted on giving it to her to read on the plane.
She didn’t buy it.
Anyone have a writing disaster story they’d like to share with me?
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